Chapter 42: Teveel and His Righteousness, Chava Devorah and Her Suffering

00:01 In the account Rabbi Avraham the Gardener[unclear] gives of his life, he speaks about the city of Pinsk. As we mentioned in the previous story, Pinsk had three yeshivos, one of them named after Reb Tevel and his wife, Chava Devorah. We began telling Tevel’s story. He was a young man who had a farm where he raised bees for honey. He had accumulated a large sum of money and wanted to give some of it to tzedakah, but he did not know to whom or for what purpose, especially since he wanted to give it anonymously. We now continue Tevel’s story. Tevel began thinking it over, but he did not want to rely on his own judgment. He felt he was too young to resolve such questions, so he went to Rabbi Moshe Yaffe, the rabbi of Pinsk, and told him about his difficulty in distributing the tzedakah. Rabbi Moshe Yaffe asked Tevel to bring him his income and expense ledgers. From them, he calculated Tevel’s profits and how much maaser he should give to tzedakah. Tevel left nine-tenths of that amount with Rabbi Moshe Yaffe to distribute as he saw fit. He kept one-tenth of the maaser to give to causes of his own choosing. Tevel followed this practice for five years, and his wealth grew greatly. The more tzedakah he gave, the greater his profits became. In time, he began lending money to estate owners in exchange for a claim on the produce their fields would yield, and here, too, he met with success. Young Tevel became very wealthy without anyone knowing it. At that time, Pinsk had a yeshiva that had been founded forty years earlier. Rabbi Shimon, a friend of the gaon Rabbi Shlomo Luria, the Maharshal, had headed it. After him, his son Rabbi Rafael held the position. When Rabbi Moshe Yaffe was appointed

02:58 rabbi of Pinsk, he also became head of the yeshiva there. The students of the Pinsk yeshiva were all accomplished young scholars. Most were married men who had undertaken to devote themselves exclusively to learning for several years. Rabbi Moshe Yaffe took care of all their material needs. He therefore gave a third of the money he received from Tevel to the yeshiva, enabling it to grow and admit more outstanding students. During that period, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Pochovitzer, the rabbi of Bykhov in the Reisen district, would come to Pinsk from time to time. Rabbi Yehuda Leib was renowned as an exceptional preacher and traveled through cities and towns to inspire Jews in their service of Hashem. On one of his visits to Pinsk, leaders of the nearby Karlin community came to him and invited him to deliver a sermon there. Rabbi Yehuda Leib accepted, spent Shabbos in Karlin, and spoke in the local shul. He had a strikingly dignified appearance and a gift for eloquence. His sermons had a tremendous effect on scholars, who grasped his profound ideas, but he also had a great influence on ordinary people. Rabbi Yehuda Leib’s sermon made a deep impression on Tevel as well, and Tevel invited him to stay at his estate. Rabbi Yehuda Leib told Tevel that he intended to travel to Venice, Italy, to have his book printed there. Tevel immediately offered to cover all his expenses, both for the journey and for the printing, on one condition: that it be kept secret. But Rabbi Yehuda Leib could not contain himself and told Rabbi Moshe Yaffe, the rabbi of Pinsk, the secret. Rabbi Moshe Yaffe nodded and said he had heard something about young Tevel and his acts of tzedakah. In those days, every Jewish community had someone whose task was to raise poor orphans. In Pinsk, this was a Jew named Mordechai Leib. Mordechai Leib and his wife raised

05:49 orphaned boys and girls. They cared for the boys until they reached bar mitzvah age. Those who showed no special aptitude for study were then placed with craftsmen, who employed them as apprentices. The boys grew up in the craftsmen’s homes and learned their trades until they could support themselves. When the girls reached a certain age, they were sent to various families to help with housework, or to estate owners to assist with suitable farm work. In Pinsk there was a carpenter named Reb Yaakov. He was a simple Jew, but G-d-fearing. He davened with a minyan and was one of the regulars at the first minyan every morning. He earned very little, barely enough to meet his needs. Once, while working on a new building, a beam fell on him and broke his neck. He lay dying for three weeks and then, sadly, passed away. Three months after his passing, his widow gave birth to a daughter, who was named Chava Devorah. When Chava Devorah turned three, her mother passed away, leaving her an orphan with neither father nor mother. The community placed the little girl in Reb Mordechai Leib’s home to be raised there until she turned twelve. She was then sent to work in the home of one of Pinsk’s householders. Chava Devorah spent six years in his home. They were very hard years for her, for she was made to work relentlessly. One day, her employer’s brother, who lived at an inn not far from Tevel’s estate, came to visit. When he saw how diligently Chava Devorah worked, he asked his brother to let him take her, since he needed help at the inn. His brother said, “Why not?” And so, without even thinking to ask Chava Devorah what she wanted, he sent her to his brother. This

08:44 upset Chava Devorah deeply. Did she have no say in her own life? But what could she do? She bit her lip and kept silent. No one would listen to any objection she might make, and as an orphan with no one to stand up for her, who would help her? Besides, she thought, perhaps this would be for the best. Surely things could not be worse than they were now. And so Chava Devorah accepted her fate. Before leaving her employer’s home, she asked her new master, the innkeeper, to give her one day off so she could visit her parents’ graves before leaving the city where she was born. But the innkeeper mocked her. “Ha! If you don’t go to them, they’ll come to you in your dreams tonight,” he told her. He made her climb into the wagon and drove her away. She did not receive so much as a penny from her Pinsk employer for all those years of backbreaking work, but she was helpless and did nothing. Chava Devorah was, in general, a quiet and G-d-fearing young woman. She had taught herself to read and made sure to daven three times a day. She could also study Chumash with a translation into the spoken language, and she recited various techinos. She was kindhearted, too, and compassionately tried to help those in need. Then she arrived at the inn. The work there was very hard. Both the innkeeper and his wife piled as much work on her as they could. They also taunted her and made her life miserable ten times a day. The innkeeper’s wife, with her venomous tongue, was especially cruel to her. Chava Devorah endured all the insults and curses in silence, without answering back. Only when she davened three times a day did she pour out the bitterness in her heart, shedding many tears as she prayed. The only day of rest she had was Shabbos. She chose a regular place beneath one of the trees

11:30 not far from the inn. There she sat all Shabbos, saying Tehillim and studying Chumash. She tried to hold back her tears, because she knew one must not cry on Shabbos. Even so, she would sometimes burst into tears, for her heart was overflowing with suffering. She realized how mistaken she had been to think that things could not be worse than before. Her present situation was far worse, both because of the backbreaking work imposed on her and because of the constant barrage of insults and curses. On top of that was the environment in which her employers lived. The people there were coarse and crude. They lived among non-Jews and had learned to live and speak like them. At least in her former employers’ home she had been among Jews, and on Shabbos and Yom Tov she would go to shul and listen from the women’s section to the congregation’s prayers and the preachers’ sermons. Here she was cut off from the Jewish world and left utterly alone. Her situation filled her with sorrow, and in her prayers she pleaded with Hakadosh Boruch Hu to have pity and mercy on her and bring her out of her bitter exile.